Issue #211 / Jun 2018

DVD: Linux Mint 18.3 "Mate" and Arch Linux

You can’t get more sci fi than a little box that listens to your instructions and talks back. Most of the leading personal assistants come in very opaque little boxes, but the open source community is hard at work on finding its own solutions. Mycroft is an open source assistant that comes on a hardware device, but you can also download the software and install it on a Linux system. Other highlights:

• Meltdown and Spectre – These catastrophic hardware bugs have created problems for computer users around world. Find out what Linux developers are doing to clean up the mess.

Root of Trust

Every day, things seem to happen that I never thought I'd see, but one recent announcement was particularly striking if you've been around the FOSS community anytime in the last 20 years: Microsoft just proclaimed they are creating their own custom version of the Linux kernel.

A lightweight Linux with excellent cloud connectivity

Testing scanners under Linux

Using scanners to digitize documents in Linux was once a perilous business, but Linux scanner technology has improved in recent years. We study the state of the art with some leading scanners from various manufacturers.

Shared birthdays among party guests

At a party with 23 guests, having two guests with the same birthday in more than 50 percent of cases may sound fairly unlikely to amateur mathematicians. Armed with statistical methods, party animal Mike Schilli sets out to prove this claim.

Meltdown, Spectre, and what they mean for Linux users

The blatant security holes known as Meltdown and Spectre, which are built into the computer hardware, are likely to keep us busy for the next few years. How is the Linux community addressing this unexpected challenge?

Accounting from the command line

Charly’s Column – colorls

The first time in our lives we got to a black-and-white Linux or Unix shell, most of us probably typed ls first. In a mixture of nostalgia and the knowledge that life is colorful, columnist Charly Kühnast plays a colorful trump card with colorls.

Resetter

Podcasts with Audacity

The glory days of podcasts might be over, but if you have something to say to your fellow humans, a digital audio recording is still a great way to deliver the message. Audacity is a free and easy tool for creating podcasts in Linux.